There’s no question about it: content marketing is critical to building your brand’s reputation online and increasing your organic search traffic. Groups such as The CAM Foundation have heralded it as the most important digital marketing trend for 2015, while research from LinkedIn has shown that 77% of marketers will increase content production in the next 12 months. Creating a consistent and engaging content strategy remains an issue for many companies however. From a lack of bandwidth to create content, to producing enough variety of it, challenges abound.

With this in mind, Social Strategy1 has an easy tip for how you can easily inject new topics into your content marketing calendar – Quora! For those not familiar with the site, it is question-and-answer website created, edited and organized by its community of users. By monitoring for topics and questions related to your business’ area of expertise, you can glean important content insights such as what questions your prospects have.

For example, if you are a property management company looking to drive brand awareness among people looking for Dallas apartments, monitoring for topics on Quora such as ‘Dallas Fort Worth’ is a great way to identify potential hooks into your target audience.

If you start searching for a particular keyword, Quora will give you instant suggestions based on your seach terms. This will include specific questions – by searching for Dallas, it will bring up questions such as “I am moving to the US as a 30-year-old. Where would be the best place for me to live in Dallas, TX?” By looking for both popular and open (unanswered) questions, you identify opportunities for topics to blog and create other content about. If one user has that question, it’s likely others do too!

Thus, if you’re struggling to come up with solid topic ideas for content marketing on a regular basis, using questions can be a simple way to fuel content ideation. It eliminates much of the guesswork and allows you to align your content with what users are looking for – resulting in a positive user experience, and increased engagement.

Want more guidance around content marketing? Check out other SS1 blogs such as How to Add Context to Your Content Marketing with Social Data, Content Marketing: What Not to Post, and 5 Secrets to Successful Content Promotion!