Five years ago, I didn’t lose sleep over brainstorming content ideas. Compared to the grind that came afterward, it was like sketching a quick map before setting off on a long, grueling hike. The real work was the hours of manual effort—with my butt glued to my desk until it sweated—turning those ideas into outlines, drafting, revising, and editing until our B2B SaaS clients finally approved each piece. That was the nature of creating content half a decade ago: light on planning, hard on execution.

It’s a different story today. 

Thanks to AI tools like ChatGPT, creating first drafts is no longer an uphill battle. AI in content marketing is now a norm. With a few well-thought-out prompts, I can auto-generate 100+ articles in a fraction of the time it once took me to write one. What felt like an exhausting hike now feels like riding an always-on escalator.

But with the content creation grind streamlined by AI, a new challenge—knowing what to create, which informs what to prompt—has taken center stage.

In this new era, brainstorming and choosing ideas isn’t a task I breeze past anymore; it’s now the make-or-break moment. A slew of AI tools in a company’s tech stack can suggest thousands of ideas on auto-pilot and even churn out content in seconds. 

But the wrong ideas will only lead to ignored content or articles that drive empty traffic. The right ideas? That’s what attracts your ideal prospects and increases the odds of executing SaaS content marketing with pieces that fuel the sales pipeline. 

That’s why I created this guide. 

To help you navigate this shift and choose ideas more likely to yield results. With the included template, you’ll find clarity on what makes a SaaS content idea great.

The Anatomy of Great Content Ideas 

Think of your content ideas as seeds, and your SaaS content marketing strategy as the soil. Even if your soil is perfectly prepared—rich in nutrients, watered, and cared for—defective seeds won’t yield a fruitful harvest. 

Regardless of how well an experienced farmer plants or nurtures them, bad seeds will eventually waste their efforts. They know this, and it’s why they avoid bad seeds like a plague. Likewise, in content marketing, no amount of strategy design will yield results on its own if the ideas you use in executing it are flawed.

So, the quality of your ideas has never mattered more, especially at a time when ideas can be auto-generated in their thousands.

It’s why I no longer rush through the content ideation process. I don’t see it as a negligible checkbox to tick off. Instead, I treat it like selecting the seeds that will guarantee my next big harvest. 

You should do the same. 

Be intentional. Choose great ideas that matter. Ideas that speak to your target buyers’ needs, and that align with your business goals. 

The anatomy of such ideas? 

Tim Suolo, Ahrefs’ CMO, gives a clue: 

I agree with Tim. 

The business potential of the created piece is the fundamental anatomy of a great content marketing idea. Specifically, you want to ask yourself a variation of the question posed in Tim’s post above. And that is, can the article I’ll create with this idea persuade a reader to recall my brand/buy my product? 

I’ll show you how I answer that question with a simple, effective template for choosing great SaaS content ideas—ideas that don’t just sprout traffic but grow your pipeline. 

But before that, you must…

Facilitate Collecting Rare Content Ideas

Regular keyword research with Google or SEO software tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush produces a lot of content ideas. Also, if you just prompt ChatGPT to suggest content ideas on any topic, you’ll get hundreds, if not thousands. But anyone can do both. 

Stop there, and you’ll be recycling the same generic ideas available to your direct and indirect competitors. Think about it for a second. If they research with the same software or prompt an AI tool as you did, won’t they get the same ideas? 

They will. 

That’s why you must go beyond generic ideas as they’re a recipe for copycat content that doesn’t impact the sales pipeline. To create differentiated content that cuts through the noise and has business-driving potential, you need rare ideas. 

Here’s how we—and you can—collect them. 

Immediately after designing the content marketing strategy for a new client project, we create an ideas-dedicated board. We call it ‘Ideas’ Bank,’ as you can see below:

The reason and need for this is that rare ideas can come from internal and external sources. From the external side, as we execute content marketing for a SaaS, we learn more about its product, audience, competitors, and niche. As a result, we often discover ideas outside the ones first identified when designing their content marketing strategy. We share those ideas in the ‘Ideas’ Bank’ board above for clients to approve. 

The same goes for the internal side.

Ideas could come as a Founder clarifies a startup’s vision or positioning. Also, as a product team collects feedback on existing or soon-to-be-built features, as a sales team faces objections, or as a customer success team learns more about existing customers, rare ideas for creating content marketing pieces often emerge.  

To facilitate the collection of such ideas, we encourage clients’ internal teams to share new ideas once they have a hunch or see a void a content piece could fill. The ‘Ideas’ Bank’ board above also gives them a place to share those ideas for us to evaluate. 

But I must admit something. 

Getting clients’ teams to do this was a struggle in the past. 

Until AI tools came onto the scene. 

Lately, we just ask clients to share meeting summaries by AI notetakers of their important internal and customer-facing calls. Reviewing talking points and highlights of these call summaries often yields a boatload of new and rare ideas. 

For instance, below is the screenshot of an internal call summary by MeetGeek, an AI notetaker. On the highlights pane to the right, we culled about a dozen, rare content ideas from the concerns, facts, and next steps discussed—ideas we never would’ve discovered for this client had we relied on SEO tools: 

But collecting ideas, no matter how rare, isn’t enough. 

You still have to choose great ones. That is, those with the potential to drive the business forward when used to create content. Those are the rare ideas you must prioritize. 

And to find them, here’s our… 

Template for Choosing Great SaaS Content Ideas

For me and my VEC Studio team, great content ideas are those with a business value score of 2 or 3, as illustrated below: 

Our thinking here is straightforward.  

For an idea to be considered ‘great,’ the article you create with it must have the potential to impact the sales pipeline or drive your business forward. Specifically, can the article we’d produce with the idea persuade a reader to recall your brand/buy your product?

It’s a yes if it meets either of these two conditions: 

1. Your product—or a feature of your product—needs to be a solution to the problem addressed by the content marketing piece said idea is used to create. This condition is a crucial requirement for
2. If the first condition isn’t possible, the piece created with the idea should bring awareness to your brand’s point of view (PoV), positioning, or strategic narrative. 

Ideas with business value scores of 2–3 fall in this range. 

But with AI tools now able to auto-generate ideas, yielding hundreds or thousands of ideas, it’s difficult to know which ones deserve a business value score of 2–3. And by extension, which ideas to prioritize for content creation. 

To solve that, I created—and use—this template: 

This template guides me (and my team) in choosing ideas for creating content marketing pieces for our SaaS clients more thoughtfully and strategically. It can guide you, too. It doesn’t matter if the ideas are from hunches, regular research, AI tools, or customer-facing or internal meeting insights. 

Answering the questions in this template ensures correct Business Value Scores are assigned to ideas. This will enable you to choose and prioritize ideas most likely to impact the sales pipeline and drive business when used to create content marketing pieces. 

The proven template questions ensure each idea: 

• Is succinctly described.
• Nudges the person suggesting/adding it to state why a content piece should be published on the idea. 
• Is given an initial business value score by the person suggesting/adding the idea (reviewed by the Strategist).
• Guides the person suggesting/adding the idea to state why they think it deserves the value score they assigned it. 
• Targets or would resonate with at least one of your company’s ideal buyer persons (ICPs) 
• Has a defined target keyword/search query. 
• Fits nicely into a cluster in your content marketing strategy and would promote a product feature or brand narrative. 

You can access the template here. 

As I’ve already stressed, this Content Ideas Business Score Evaluator Template guides my team—and can guide you—to…

Prioritize Fewer, Better Ideas 

Our minds remain the best source for conjuring rare, impactful ideas that lead to thought-provoking content. As I’ve emphasized throughout this article, generating ideas is no longer the problem.

It has never been.

Even before the advent of AI tools, producing hundreds of ideas with quick topical research on SEO and content platforms was easy. AI has only accelerated the process, making it even easier to uncover countless options with just a few prompts. But with this abundance comes a critical need: the ability to prioritize fewer, better ideas—ideas that align with your business goals and can make a meaningful impact.

That’s why my team now approaches content ideation with strategic intent. The template I’ve linked above is central to this process. It helps us evaluate ideas by answering key questions about their relevance, feasibility, and potential business impact.

For example, as new business trends emerge; as you read articles, listen to podcasts, interact on social media, or engage in customer calls, rare and unique ideas will inevitably strike. 

But you can’t, and shouldn’t, pursue them all.

Taking a moment to document these ideas and then methodically answering the template questions allows you to slow down, reflect, and prioritize those with the highest potential. 

Let me show you how this works in practice.

I once stumbled upon an article by AudiencePlus about building audiences for B2B demand generation. While reading it, a lightbulb went off: Since B2B audiences grew one subscriber at a time, why not craft content for one Ideal Buyer Persona (ICP) at a time? After all, isn’t that how you truly connect with someone’s interests and compel them to join your audience? 

This idea resonated, but I didn’t act on it at once. I first used our template to evaluate it:

• Did it align with VEC Studio’s content marketing strategy?
• Did it address one of our ICPs’ pain points?
• Could it advance our business goals? 

As replicated in our internal project management suite below, answering these questions led to a high Business Value Score: 

The result of this? 

The final piece on this idea, “How to Build B2B Owned Audiences? Write for One ICP at a Time,” led to new sales conversations after I promoted it on LinkedIn. 

But that’s not all. Despite minimal search engine optimization, the article now ranks among the top three organic search results on Google for the term ‘writing for one ICP:’

This success didn’t surprise me—and it shouldn’t surprise you, either. The idea had a Business Value Score of 3, determined through the same framework I want to share with you.

By using it to give your content ideas the same thoughtful evaluation, you can focus on fewer, high-impact ideas that impact your sales pipeline and yield business results.

So, here’s your next step.

Leverage my proven template to start prioritizing fewer, better ideas. It’s a simple but powerful process that can transform your content marketing strategy execution and help you create pieces that truly move the needle for your SaaS business.

You can access it here.