Ideate With Ease: Unlocking Success With Contently’s Ideation Tools

We’ve all been there — the dreaded blank screen staring back at us, begging us to ideate something original. The cursor is blinking, and the white page is taunting you. It’s a tale as old as time. But writer’s block doesn’t have to be so daunting, especially not in content marketing.

What if there were a way to ideate story ideas catered to your specific content strategy? Contently’s comprehensive content marketing platform has those tools and more to help your team plan, scale, and pivot to any content creation demand.

Ideate Your Next Story With Precision

With a clear strategy in place, the content team can request and field content ideas that match audience needs and business goals. Contently’s content marketing platform (CMP) facilitates this process by providing a central place to collect, sort, and communicate ideas before sending them out for production.

Our ideation capabilities transform ideas from meh to magnificent. How do we do it? We enable you to take full control of your pitch process, automate ideation with SEO, and prioritize content requests from other departments, all in one place.

Contently offers a wide variety of options for ideation, including:

• Pre-built pitch request forms to clarify the audience, specific topic pillar, SEO keyword target, and other relevant information
• SEO Story Ideas to leverage your pre-determined SEO keywords from your content strategy to help you ideate new story ideas
• Standardized request forms to prompt business stakeholders to clearly communicate what they want to do and how they want the content team to help

Ready to explore a world of inspired brainstorming, strategic pitching, and content requests that will have you channeling your inner Don Draper (minus the whisky, of course)? Let’s dive into the details of all these features together.

1. Pitches

Contently’s Ideation tab highlights three main functionalities, one of which includes pitches.

Here, you can field the pitches that are coming into your queue and choose to accept or decline the idea, or create a pitch request for a team of writers you know and trust.

Once a writer is ready to submit a pitch, they’ll simply fill out a form to showcase their idea with a potential title, description, sources, or links that might be relevant for the managing editor to review. They’ll also add the desired pay range to open the negotiation if the price has not already been set in the pitch request.

As pictured above, you can easily sort your pitches by review status, publication or line of business, topic pillar, contributor, and more.

Need to send the ideas to a key stakeholder outside the platform? You can easily export these pitches into an Excel file with a quick download of the data.

Maybe you need more people ideating for you, and you want to put out a broader call for creatives. By adding a link to your blog or resource center, you can request writers to pitch you their ideas. Anyone who submits the form will be logged in your review queue for fielding.

2. SEO Story Ideas

SEO Story Ideas is a tab that enables you to utilize your content strategy for ideation. Our proprietary algorithm suggests SEO Story Ideas based on your documented keywords, giving you topics to accept or decline accompanied by their average search volume and cost per click.

You can easily sort your SEO Story Ideas by review status, publication or line of business, or pillar topic associated.

3. Content Requests

As content marketers, we are all too familiar with the emails, direct messages, or office drive-bys that end with a content request. To ensure clear expectations on timing and prioritization, a content request form is often necessary to field these types of asks.

This brings us to the final tab of our ideation functionality. Our content strategy section enables users to create specific forms for requests like these. When a colleague requests a piece of content, the form will lead them through a series of important questions that you can customize. The more specific your questionnaire, the better informed you’ll be on the expectations for each asset.

All content requests end up here for review. Sorted by title, publication or line of business, content request form, submitter, date requested, and approval status, this tab enables you to easily assess each project and prioritize it alongside your other work.

Whether you are looking for a way to ideate new content ideas through pitching or SEO strategy, or you need a way to prioritize your content requests with other demands of your role, Contently’s ideation functionality can help you streamline your work.

Ideate Then Create

Once you’ve decided to work with a writer, you’ll simply accept the pitch and move on to create an assignment.

When the accept button is clicked, the pitch will automatically be placed in the brief, where you can edit the persona target, word count, topic pillar, SEO keyword, and other crucial information necessary for the writer to get started. You’ll also be able to attach a templated workflow and add payment steps along the way.

Unlock growth, one piece of content at a time. Transform your strategy with Contently. Request your discovery call today.