Planning for content marketing doesn’t need to be a guessing game.

We primarily work with Pinterest, and we’ve found over time that it can be quite easy to predict what content business owners and bloggers should be posting, writing and emailing about.

In the Pinterest world, it’s a general rule that you should be posting about something at least 45 days out, so it’s important to have your content ready to go for when people want it!

Here are a few ways to predict your future content topics:

1. Visit Pinterest Trends

Even if you aren’t on Pinterest, Pinterest Trends is an amazing tool for finding blogging and other social media content. They list what’s currently trending on Pinterest as well as popular trends broken down by their big categories.

These are:

• fashion
• food and drinks
• home decor
• beauty
• and travel.

If you’re a travel blogger and you see that Croatia is trending, we highly recommend either creating content about Croatia or repurposing content that you already have.

If you’re a beauty brand and see that bandanas are trending, we recommending posting a tik tok or reel of your hair accessories because you know that shoppers are looking for these items.

2. Browse Google Trends

Want to see what people are searching around the world? Google will tell you! You can use the Google Trends feature to see what is currently trending in Google search, as well as look up specific phrases that people have searched over the last 12 months. Not only will this let you see what’s popular, but you can see it broken down by region too—this can help guide your social media advertising, if you do that.

3. Consider Yearly Trends

If you know that people started shopping for the winter holidays in July last year, that’s a pretty good indicator that they’ll do it again this year (so start posting those Christmas holiday gift guides early)!

Generally, you should be posting for holidays at least 1-2 months out, sometimes earlier. For example, if your brand sells Halloween costumes, we recommend posting about them as early as June or July.

You should also consider yearly focus shifts of the general population. If your brand sells productivity and organization tools or services, you should ramp up your content marketing for that in July and August, as many people find that they need a “reset” in September when kids go back to school. If you’re a fitness blogger, you should be ready to ramp up your marketing in December in January when people are considering setting New Year’s Resolutions.

And let’s not forget life events! For example, for wedding photographers, we recommend having engagement-related content ready in the fall, as many couples tend to get engaged over the winter holidays.

Bottom line: when you start thinking ahead of your consumer, you’ll be better prepared for their wants and needs, WHEN they want or need them. This principle should guide your content marketing, and we hope these tools will help you find the content your audience is seeking.

P.S. If you have your content ready to go but aren’t sure how to visually market it on social media, you should check out our template shop 😉