Finding content ideas has never been the problem. The problem is knowing which ones deserve to be produced, and why now. A team that publishes without answering that question adds content to its website without knowing which of them were of any use.
Five sources feed content ideation: your audiences, your sector, your teams, your editorial capital and an outside partner. None of them is new. What has changed is the speed at which Perplexity, NotebookLM and configured assistants let you use them, provided you know what to ask them.
1. Your audiences: collect the questions that go unanswered
Your clients and your readers ask questions that nobody answers. Each one is a subject.
The ways of collecting them have not changed: the questions your sales and customer service teams receive, the comments under your publications, surveys, social listening. Schedule this collection at regular intervals.
What AI adds. A conversational search engine such as Perplexity queries forums, professional communities and discussion threads, then summarises what your audience is looking for. Use it to spot demand.
A typical question: “Which questions about industrial energy transition do communications managers in mid-sized companies ask without finding a clear answer?” You get angles phrased in your audience’s own words.
2. Your sector: turn market monitoring into subjects
Follow sector studies, expert publications, podcasts, competitors. Set aside time each week for this monitoring.
You read, you save, you subscribe, and the calendar stays empty. What is missing is the decision: which subject to draw from each reading. Take that decision when you fill in your editorial calendar.
What AI adds. In Perplexity, re-run the same queries on your subjects: you spot a theme before it is saturated. NotebookLM works on a corpus you build yourself: import your studies, your reports and your reference articles, then question them together.
One useful question: “Which unresolved contradictions appear in these documents?” A subject your market argues over without settling it calls for a position.
3. Your teams: prepare the ideas meeting
Bring together different roles: marketing, sales, customer service, subject experts. Each sees your market from a different position.
This meeting is often the first to be dropped when the calendar fills up. Keep it short and prepare its brief: which subjects do our clients find nowhere else, and which are we alone in being able to treat?
What AI adds. An assistant configured with your offer and your voice brings the material for the meeting: angles left untreated, emerging queries, formats missing from your output. After the meeting, it ranks the ideas by actual demand and flags those that overlap with published content. The decision stays with the team.
Our two public frameworks feed this configuration: the Clear Offer Framework for the offer, the Brand Voice Framework for the voice.
4. Your editorial capital: use what you already have
Record your ideas as they come, in a single repository, so that you can find them when you need them.
Editorial capital is not limited to ideas waiting to be used: it covers everything you have published. An article often touches on a point that deserves its own page. A case study rests on a principle nobody has written down. A newsletter carries a position that never got its own page.
What AI adds. Import your published content into a corpus and look for the connections never spelled out, the three-year-old subjects that need updating, the angles you only touched on. This is the principle of content upcycling: drawing new content from what you have already published, rather than republishing it as it stands. A recorded interview provides the material for several articles; a case study, a method.
A content inventory gives you the starting list.
5. An outside partner: have your positioning read
Ideation is not something to outsource. An outside editorial partner examines your choice of subjects and brings two things a team does not produce about itself: a reading of its positioning from the outside, and the list of subjects it avoids out of habit or caution.
What AI adds. We examine your editorial architecture with tools: duplicates, internal linking, subject coverage. The result names the subjects and the order in which to produce them.
From idea to brief
An idea becomes a brief when four questions are settled, before any production.
- Who is looking for this content? Which reader, at which stage of their decision.
- Where does it sit in the architecture? A cornerstone article, a satellite article or a Hub resource, and which internal links it receives.
- What result does it aim for? Visibility, introductions, conversion or loyalty. The metric is chosen before the writing starts.
- Does it already exist? A check against published content and offer pages, so that two pages do not target the same intent.
An assistant configured with your voice and your architecture turns a raw idea into a structured brief. The decision to produce belongs to the person who answers the four questions.
Frequently asked questions about content ideas
How do you find content ideas?
Draw on five sources: your clients’ questions, your sector monitoring, a prepared internal meeting, the content you have already published and an outside view. Work them at regular intervals, rather than when the calendar is empty.
How do you find content ideas when the team is short of time?
Start with your editorial capital. It is the quickest source, because it requires no collection: your published content already carries angles you only touched on and principles nobody has written down. One article often gives you the subject of the next.
How do you know whether an idea deserves to be produced?
Answer the four questions of the brief: who is looking for this content, where it sits in your architecture, what result it aims for, and whether it already exists. An idea that fails these four questions does not get produced.
To put this way of working in place in your team, contact us.