To find great marketing ideas you should put yourself in the shoes of your buyer’s persona and think like your customer.

That’s good advice but it’s not as easy as it sounds. You can’t walk in a person’s shoes or think like customers unless you go into the field to do your research.

Here are some less-used channels and non-obvious sources to help you come up with #content that works well for your audience.

Your persona may include roles or titles. Use those to dig deeper and do an internet search for job descriptions, which often can be found in job postings.

Job descriptions reveal key responsibilities, key performance indicators (KPI) they must deliver, and who they report to within the organization. With that knowledge, you can create  #content to educate your audience on how to meet these responsibilities and KPIs effectively.

Follow industry players who are active on LinkedIn. What they share and write often reflects the latest insights in your industry.

Look over the posts and comments to identify which are the hottest topics and create #content around that.

TIP: If the commenter’s statement would be valuable to include in your content, ask them if it’s OK for you to publish and support your positioning. This also helps build relationships with industry players who may be willing to share your #content.

Join your #sales team for the next demo or call. Listen to the prospects’ frustrations and pains. Note the keywords your prospects use. Be especially attentive to their jargon. Develop #content that includes their exact words or craft article intros that address their pain points.

Each pain point identified in the prospects’ answers reveals a #content opportunity to solve their problem, whether it be with educational materials, explanatory infographics, video tutorials, etc.

The next hidden gem is your customer support team. They are in the closest regular contact with the clients. Imagine how many insights they collect. While you can’t listen to every customer service interaction, you can use tools to collect that information from the customer support silo.

Turn on email notifications from your customer service chatbot. Your customers’ questions – and your company’s answers – will be delivered straight to your inbox. The information you collect is a good baseline for your product-related content, the FAQ section, and tutorials.

TIP: Set up your software to filter these emails into a singular folder so they don’t clutter your inbox.

Interactive #webinars are a sweet spot to chase #content ideas as the hosts usually use pre-surveys, on-the-go polls, or may encourage questions in the discussions to learn about attendees.

You can also create (or reuse) content directly from your #webinars. For example, you can write a takeaway wrapup. Or you could reuse a subtopic’s content and add a third-party expert opinion.