Content marketing research is an essential marketing technique, specifically looking into what should be involved in the content. Without doing this research, it is difficult to know whether your audience will be interested in your content or not. It is all about creating valuable and consistent content to attract your audience and ensure your brand visibility, web traffic and leads all grow in the right direction.
Content is key to engaging with the audience as much as possible and after all, this is the main aim of your work. By investing time in researching the audience you are trying to reach will give a better understanding of what content most resonates with them. This process will help to create a voice for your brand and mixing this with your topic should naturally develop a narrative for your audience. The idea of content marketing research is to analyse information from industry sources like reports, articles, surveys, and studies but to also gather an insight into your audience through more personal, online sources. Ways to do this can be via social media, simply take a note of what your audience are sharing and engaging with. Gather some of these examples and it will help you develop your own individual content library of good sources that you can use and look to for inspiration in the future.
Other sources to research for content marketing could be podcasts, infographic, videos, and blogs. Blogs have become an increasingly popular way to validate your brand and attract an audience. Businesses with blogs get 67% more leads than other companies. You can create your own blog and write posts about your work to help generate exposure. It is a great way to creatively add value to your content by adding internal or external links to relevant content. There are so many sites that accept guest posts from other sources, allowing you to add your own content and backlinks to their site and gain that all important exposure whilst growing traffic. Sites like AI Guest Posts, Outreach Mama and Fat Joe all accept this kind of content and are very useful tools.
Looking at direct competitors is also a great research approach – see what they are doing, and how they are doing it? What seems to work well? Notify any trends you can see happening across the market, and if there are any gaps where you can see for opportunities. If there are many competitiors, do not take this as a negative sign – at least it assures you there is a market for your niche. This will be valuable information to take forward.
Taking all of this into consideration and implementing with your ideas, along with the other research you have completed will be a great base for your plan and strategy. Creating a plan of resources, timings and how you are going to execute your new research will also form an important part of your content market research. Depending on how you like to organise your work, creating a schedule will be a vital to implementing your findings. To help manage this there are tools like Asana that can help you set up timelines of tasks, different aspects of your workload and reports to track how it has been going. Once you feel happy you have integrated this into your work, to keep relevant and fresh against the competition, try and build this into your weekly routine.
