I've created content that has:
Generated thousands of backlinks.
Generated hundreds of shares.
Generated millions in sales.
How? Prioritizing research...
Here are 9 ways marketers can use research to increase the likelihood of content success:
Customer Research
One of my fav ways to figure out who an audience is for a SaaS product is to run an analysis of the reviews that a company (and its competitors) are getting.
Scrape all the job titles for the reviewers and do an analysis of most common job titles.
Audience Research
In a remote world, the location of your audience isn't always the most important anymore BUT tools like @AudienseCo offer a great insight into this.
It's also valuable for learning how your audience self describes themselves. Here's my audience:
Social Share Research
Want to create content that gets shared? Study the content that has already gotten them. Use @BuzzSumo to better understand what links get love on FB, Twitter, Pinterest or even Reddit.
Look for trends on the 'type' of content that resonates.
Media Behaviour Research
What podcasts, newsletters, blogs, YouTube channels and other media channels does your audience follow on a regular basis? Tools like @sparktoro help with this...
This is powerful cause you can use it to find the stories that have content-market fit.
Backlink Research
What type of content in your industry generates the most links? In Martech, we found that free tools get the most links followed by definitions (ie. what is SEO) followed by stats posts.
Export industry content by links, track by content type and analyze it.
Top Content Research
Go to Reddit and sort the content in a niche Subreddit by the top posts. Go to Product Hunt and type in a keyword relevant to your industry.
See what content has generated the most engagement to see trends around the type of content people want.
Community Research
Want to tap into a community? Do a search for the sites that get shared within them the most. You can do a quick search in Hackernews for @TheHustle and see a ton of their greatest hits in this community.
More Community Research
Go inside of the Slack channels, Facebook groups, Discords and spaces where your audience is spending time. Look for threads that get tons of engagement.
These are insights around what your audience cares about and wants more information on.
Virality Research
Go to the search bar on Twitter and type:
[KEYWORD or Phrase] min_retweets:50 min_faves:50
This will give you only the posts on that topic with a minimum of 50 retweets and 50 likes. Use this to get insight into what type of content people resonate with
That's enough research ideas for now...
The team at @FoundationIncCo might not like that I'm giving away all our strategies for free... But it's real.
These research techniques and tools can unlock some amazing insights & returns.
If you made it this far... You're my kinda people.
And I know you're a marketing geek so I have a gift for you. It's a collection of my favorite marketing threads:
For more tweets about B2B marketing, SaaS & how you can unlock success in marketing.
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