6 Resources Content Strategists Could Use to Find New Ideas These tools will inspire marketers by leveraging real time data to identify the most relevant and engaging content topics.

Finding fresh and engaging topics for blogs, newsletters and white papers can be a challenge, especially if your digital strategy is regularly churning out content for your audience. The same is true for finding content to share and integrate with your strategy. With countless accounts and websites to follow, you could spend all your time just searching for meaningful content.

Lux Narayan, CEO of Unmetric, a brand-based social media-intelligence platform, sees this challenge through the data his company collects and analyzes.

"For social marketers tasked with creating and curating content on a regular basis across multiple networks, it is not uncommon for the well of creativity to run dry from time to time," he says.

So what is a marketer to do to get over these dry spells?

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For starters, consider one or more of the following resources, which use existing online data to identify the most engaging content trending with your audience and will, hopefully, provide the inspiration your digital strategy needs.

1. Hubspot Topic Generator

Hubspot is one of the leading companies for digital marketing and content creation, and the company's simple and free topic generator is a useful tool for brainstorming subjects to research and write about.

2. Klout Explore

In addition to providing a measure of your social media influence, Klout's Explore tool serves up content suggestions based on keywords you provide. The tool also provides valuable analytics, such as showing the percentage of your social media audience that might be interested in a particular article, so you can then tailor your content according to the topics your audience finds most interesting.

The Klout mobile app makes it simple and easy to quickly find and share relevant content. It's free with registration, and active accounts often receive free perks from partner businesses.

3. Hootsuite Suggestions

Hootsuite is an incredibly useful tool for managing your social media strategy across a variety of accounts, and the suggested content feature is a great way to find the most relevant content based on your social media activity. If you do not have a Hootsuite account, you can utilize the Hootsuite Suggestions mobile app, which allows you to find and share great content right from your smart device. The app allows limited free suggestions, but you can upgrade for a small monthly fee of $4.99 to get access to more content.

4. Daily by Buffer

Buffer is another content suggestion service that allows you to find and share great content. Daily by Buffer, the mobile phone app, has been dubbed the Tinder of social media, allowing you to swipe and instantly reject or schedule pertinent content. The free version is limited, but you can upgrade to the more robust service for $10 per month.

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5. Unmetric Inspire

A social media competitive intelligence company focused on brands, Unmetric offers a product within its suite of data analytics and benchmarking tools called Inspire. Think of Inspire as a social media search engine that allows you to enter a topic or hashtag and get a customized stream of relevant and trending content from Unmetric's massive database of more than 25,000 brands filtered by audience engagement, industry, geography and time.

Targeted toward marketers at brands and digital agencies, Inspire is part of an entire social analytics platform that starts at $490 per month.

6. Banjo

Banjo is a cool app that scours the web for the most talked-about news items on social media. The app is able to break down trending topics based on location, so that marketers can quickly identify trends in news, sports, music and events. It is not necessarily business related (unless a business topic is trending), but it can provide real time intelligence that businesses may find valuable. The best part: it's free.

All of these tools have one thing in common. They all leverage data to identify the most pertinent and engaging content on the web, allowing marketers to stay relevant and produce content that their audiences want.

"Today, data's role in the creative process has increased, and there are numerous tools that marketers can leverage to understand what content and campaigns work best," says Narayan of Unmetric. "While data can never fully replace human creativity, it can be used to spark new ideas when the creative well runs dry."

What other tools do you use to find great content that inspires your digital strategy? Please share with others in the comments section below.

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