How to come up with content ideas: 15 examples to inspire yours

Sometimes the hardest part of content marketing is knowing what content to produce.

You can spend hours staring at a blank content calendar, paralysed by too many possibilities and not enough conviction about any of them. 

Or you could spend that same time chasing every ad hoc request from stakeholders, reactive and scattered, never building real momentum.

Neither gets you anywhere.

What actually works is having a clear sense of what you’re trying to achieve, who you’re creating for, and a few strong ideas that fit both – then executing those well rather than spreading yourself thin.

This post covers how to think about content ideas strategically, then gives you 15 tried-and-tested formats to spark your own thinking, each with real examples of brands doing them well.

How to come up with content ideas

Before jumping to formats, it’s worth getting clear on a few things that will make every content decision easier.

• Know what you’re trying to achieve. Brand awareness focused content and conversion-focused content look completely different. If you mix them without intention, you end up with a scattered strategy that builds momentum on nothing. Be clear on your goals first, and how the content you produce will build towards those goals, before you think about format and topic ideas.

• Understand your audience beyond their job title. What are they genuinely struggling with? What questions come up in sales calls? What keeps them up at 3am? The more specific you can get, the more useful your content will be – and the easier it becomes to decide what to create next.

• Find your unique angle. The best ideas live where your audience’s needs overlap with something only you can speak to. Ravio has proprietary salary data nobody else has – so insights-focused content that answers audience questions using that proprietary data is their unique angle. Incident.io builds incident response software for engineers, and their team are engineers themselves – so sharing how they actually build is genuinely interesting to their audience in a way it wouldn’t be coming from anyone else. Figure out where your version of that overlap is.

• Have a narrative your content ladders up to. The brands with the most effective content have a clear point of view that runs through everything. Ravio believes compensation decisions made on outdated, unreliable data aren’t really decisions – they’re guesses. UserEvidence believes authentic customer proof beats polished claims. When every piece reinforces these same ideas, your content compounds. Without it, you’re publishing one-off pieces that don’t add up to anything.

• Keep a running ideas dump. Good ideas don’t arrive when you sit down to plan, they arrive when you’re reading customer feedback, when someone in your ICP posts something worth responding to, when you’re out for a walk. Keep a log of ideas in a google doc, a Notion page, a voice note – wherever you’ll actually use it. When you sit down to plan, you’ll have something to draw from.

15 content marketing ideas (real examples)

1. Recurring conversational webinar series

A recurring webinar series with a clear audience and repeatable structure builds recognition and habit. Each session becomes a piece of repurposable content – LinkedIn clips, written summaries, on-demand replays.

Example: Sequel’s Game Changers CMO series

Sequel (a webinar platform) has been running regular conversations with CMOs and marketing leaders since September 2022. 

Same format each time, same type of guest, consistently repurposed. It’s become their entire top-of-funnel content focus, now with its own logo and spot in the main website navigation – and an expanded Masterclass Series underneath the same brand. For a webinar tool marketing to marketers, the format naturally demonstrates their product working whilst genuinely educating their audience.

Read more about this example >

Example: Ravio’s Reward Hours

A recurring webinar series where Ravio’s CPO sits down with a Reward Leader to discuss the challenges facing their function – called ‘Reward Hours’. 

It’s a consistent format built around the exact problems Ravio’s product helps solve, and a conversational approach appealing to an audience who often feel isolated as a team-of-one.

Plus, it gets repurposed into a YouTube on-demand webinar, plus short clips via YouTube Shorts and LinkedIn.

2. Create short-form video that works natively on the platform

Most B2B short-form video is repurposed content – webinar clips, talking heads, product demos chopped into smaller pieces. The alternative is to start with what actually works on the platform you’re distributing on, then find a natural connection to your product. 

Example: Lovable’s tech history YouTube Shorts

Lovable (an AI builder for non-coders) created a series of YouTube Shorts sharing fascinating facts about technological scale, then drawing the parallel to what’s happening with development today. 

“How much coffee do humans drink?” covers the tech that made 2 billion daily cups possible, then pivots to Lovable. 13 million views.

“How does humanity upload so much content?” follows the same format. 

The first 20 seconds don’t feel like branded content at all – and the connection to product, when it comes, is earned.

Read more about this example >

3. Crowdsource expert responses to a question your audience is asking

Instead of positioning your brand as the expert, find a question your audience is genuinely wrestling with, ask practitioners to share their honest, experience-backed take, and compile the best responses. 

You get diverse voices, built-in distribution through contributors sharing content they’re featured in, and something more credible than anything you could manufacture yourself.

Example: Ravio’s compensation communication blog

“How to communicate compensation changes to employees” is a problem every HR and Rewards leader faces and nobody has a perfect answer to. Ravio gathered specific tactics from 11 Reward leaders in their community, sharing the real approaches that had actually worked in organisations.

Example: Ahrefs’ SEO interview questions post

Eight SEO hiring managers, each sharing the one interview question they actually ask. Useful to anyone on the job market, credible because it comes from real practitioners, and each contributor has a reason to share it.

Example: Air’s Zoltair Speaks

Air asked 20 marketing leaders for one prediction each about 2026 and let contributors become the distribution engine by sharing their takes on LinkedIn.

Read more about this example >

Example: Storyblok’s Real Marketing Curriculum

29 marketing lessons from practitioners across the spectrum – CMOs, copywriters, marketing ops people – each keeping the original voice of the person who shared it and positioning Storyblok as facilitator.

Read more about this example >

4. Film an interview series somewhere unexpected

Most business interview content looks the same – two people on a sofa or a Zoom call. 

Taking conversations somewhere meaningful changes the dynamic. People open up differently when they’re doing something they love, and stories surface that would never come up in a studio setting.

Example: UserEvidence’s The Long Game

UserEvidence films marketing leaders having real conversations whilst doing activities they love – golfing, skiing, in their hometowns.

The environment makes for more interesting content, and guests share it because it’s a genuinely creative project rather than just another podcast appearance.

Read more about this example >

5. Apply a trending social media format to your space

Trending formats work because people are already engaging with them. Rather than creating something from scratch, find a format that’s already resonating on the platforms your audience uses and apply it to scenarios specific to your industry.

Example: Pinpoint’s Red Flag, Green Flag

Pinpoint filmed talent acquisition professionals reacting to common candidate scenarios using a format already popular on TikTok. Instantly relatable to anyone who’s hired, and distinctive enough that competitors couldn’t copy it without looking like a copycat.

Read more about this example >

6. Run original research on a problem your audience is wrestling with

Survey your audience or a broader population about a challenge in your space and present the findings in a way that’s genuinely useful.

Example: Typeform’s Get Real campaign

Typeform surveyed 1,300 people about the reality of influencer marketing, then built an interactive landing page presenting findings across five chapters with video responses woven throughout. Contributors became natural distribution advocates when it launched. 

And the format also demonstrated Typeform’s own survey capabilities e.g. video responses – brand campaign and product campaign at the same time.

Read more about this example >

Example: Ravio’s Behind Closed Doors: Compensation Reviews report

HR and Rewards leaders constantly want to know how their peers are running compensation reviews – how often, how much manager input, how they handle performance vs market adjustments. 

So Ravio surveyed 140 companies to answer exactly those questions with real peer data rather than anecdote. 

7. Create playbooks on how others achieve something with your product

Show your audience how their peers accomplish something they’re trying to do, with your product as part of the solution.

Example: Vector’s Proven Playbooks

Rather than case studies claiming results, Vector created deep-dive guides showing exactly how customers built their growth strategies – actual tactics, actual processes. It does the job of a case study and social proof, but it’s also useful whether you bought the product or not because of the education on tactics.

Read more about this example >

8. Share how your team builds

Publishing how your team actually works – the technical decisions, the trade-offs, the day-to-day approaches – builds trust and employer brand simultaneously. 

It works best when your audience includes people doing similar work, because they’re genuinely curious how others approach the same problems.

Example: Incident.io’s engineering blog

Incident.io publishes posts authored by their own engineers about how they build – their technology stack choices, how they’re approaching AI integration, how they think about developer experience. 

Their audience are engineers, so seeing how another engineering team thinks and works is genuinely valuable content.

Example: Monzo’s technology blog

Monzo maintains a dedicated technology section covering everything from how they ship product to building specific features to what it’s like to join the team – authored by the people doing the work, not a marketing team. It serves as employer brand content that also builds customer trust.

9. Address the objections that stall your sales process

The questions that keep coming up in sales conversations are exactly the questions your prospects are searching for answers to online. Create content that addresses them directly.

Example: Ravio’s year-round benchmarking blog

A common reason Ravio customers consider churning: they don’t think they need compensation data outside of hiring season. 

So Ravio created an article breaking down seven other moments in the compensation lifecycle where current market data matters. It does sales work before the conversation even starts.

10. Target high-intent bottom-of-funnel searches

Find the searches your ideal buyers make when they’re already evaluating options – “best X for Y”, “X alternatives”, “how to do X” – and create content that genuinely helps them make that decision.

Example: Ostara’s climate control systems guide

Ostara published a comprehensive guide reviewing 14 climate control systems for commercial polytunnel farms. 

Thorough, specific, written for someone actively evaluating their options – with Ostara presented as one of them. Useful enough to rank, specific enough to convert.

11. Educate in-market buyers on how your product solves their problem

Create content framed around a problem your buyer is trying to solve, then show how your product helps. The customer’s goal is the hero. The product is the mechanism.

Example: Gong 

Gong publishes posts framed entirely around sales and revenue challenges their buyers face – how to forecast retention, how to engineer revenue impact through enablement – with their product woven in as the solution. The framing is always outcome-first.

Example: Cognism

Cognism does the same for demand generation. How SMBs can run enterprise-level ABM on a lean budget teaches a real strategy, with Cognism’s data positioned as the tool that makes it possible. How to find business decision makers in a company answers a practical sales question, with Cognism as the obvious next step.

12. Use your product data to answer questions your audience is asking

If your product generates data about how people work or what’s performing in your space, use it. Empirical answers to common questions are more compelling than opinion pieces, and nobody else can replicate them.

Example: Gong Labs

Gong analyses sales call data at scale and publishes findings – “Do execs really reply to cold email?”, “The best and worst cold call openers, backed by data from 300 million calls.” Nobody else has that data, so nobody else can make that content.

Example: Ravio’s insights blogs

Ravio uses their compensation dataset to answer questions their audience can’t get reliable answers to elsewhere – how salaries in India’s tech market compare to Europe, which employee groups are most likely to exceed the EU Pay Transparency Directive’s 5% pay gap threshold. The data comes directly from their platform, so the content is impossible to replicate.

13. Build a template or example library from your community

Invite users to share what they’ve built or created with your product. The content comes from your community – you provide the platform and the curation.

Example: Miro’s Miroverse

Miro’s community template gallery is built almost entirely on user contributions. Over half the keywords driving traffic to Miro’s website relate to templates, much of it powered by Miroverse. It’s a PLG content strategy at scale, driven by the community rather than the marketing team.

Example: Lovable’s Discover page

Lovable’s main navigation has one content destination: a gallery of real projects built by users that visitors can actually interact with. It shows what’s possible with the product better than any blog post could.

14. Build free tools or templates targeting SEO opportunities

Create something genuinely useful for a task your audience does regularly. These pages rank for high-intent searches, provide immediate value, and introduce people to your product naturally.

Example: Ravio’s salary benchmark pages and calculator

Ravio built a free calculator targeting searches like “compa ratio calculator” and “range penetration calculator”. Someone using that tool is likely building compensation bands – exactly when Ravio’s product becomes relevant.

Example: Canva’s template library

Canva’s templates are both a product feature and a content library. Search for almost any design format and Canva ranks prominently. The template is free, the experience demonstrates the product, and getting started requires signing up.

15. Vibe code a game or interactive experience

Build something playable that your audience would genuinely want to share. AI coding tools have made this far more accessible than it used to be.

Example: Qwilr Quest

Qwilr built an 8-bit arcade game that pulls your LinkedIn profile and turns your career history into a playable side-scroller. It spread across LinkedIn for weeks because it’s fun, personal, and designed to be shared. No form, no CTA – just something Qwilr’s audience of salespeople and marketers actually wanted to play.

Where to go from here with deciding which content ideas to use

These 15 ideas aren’t a menu to order everything from. 

They’re a starting point for figuring out which one or two might work for your audience, your goals, and what you can actually do well.

The brands getting the most out of their content aren’t trying all of these at once. They’ve found a few that fit and committed to executing them consistently.

If you want a new real-world content example to steal inspiration from every two weeks, that’s exactly what the Content Ideas newsletter is here for.