You hopefully read our six questions to answer when starting to consider your company’s content marketing strategy on our main content marketing page. We’ve found clients typically answer questions one and two fairly well (although understanding who your target market is goes far beyond their demographics), but when it comes to understanding what type of content to create they really look to us for guidance. This is the fun part for our Austin Content Marketing Agency as we get to start researching what exactly it is you will write, create videos, infographics or how to guides about. Research drives everything we do at Neon Ambition and deciding what information your customers or potential customers are looking for is one of the most important steps in creating your content marketing strategy. Creating quality content that either informs, entertains or educates is time consuming so we don’t want to waste time answering questions no one is asking.
Discover What Questions Your Target Market Searches For
We have plenty of ways of uncovering the questions people are asking both online and off. Here are a few to get you started:
1. Who speaks to your potential customers and customers? Most companies quickly say “the sales team” and they are certainly right. But who else speaks with them before or after? Does your receptionist often get asked questions before they put the caller through to sales? What about your delivery team? Are they asked questions about how the product works when they drop it off? What questions does your executive team get asked when they speak with your customers, partners, investors, or even their friends or colleagues at other companies? What about customer service? Do they repeatedly answer the same question over and over again? This exercise always generates lots of ideas.
2. The obvious one (for us online marketing geeks anyway) is to use Google’s Keyword Planner. This provides data on how many times a particular search query is made each month. It also will suggest other keywords and keyword phrases (read questions) that relate to the keywords you searched for.
3. Google Keyword Suggest and Searches Related To – As you type in a keyword in Google it will suggest the most commonly searched for phrases related to that term. This quickly lets you know what many other people are searching related to your product or service. For example when I search for “Content Marketing” the following suggested searches pop up:
And at the bottom of the search results page for the search “content marketing strategy” Google shows the following:
Our consultants then evaluate the results for each of those suggested or related searches and identify opportunities.
4. Question and Answer sites – Who uses these sites? I can’t say I ever have but people do and there can be gold in there. Since Marissa Mayer came on board at Yahoo! their Yahoo! Answers pages have seen a new life. Any potential customer’s question is one worth answering in our book. If you do not answer it then it likely will be by one of your competitors.
5. Reviews and Competitor Reviews – I hope that you monitor and read every review written about your company or product but if you’re not now is the time to start. When you read your reviews you hear what people love and/or hate about your company. Implementing changes to your service and/or product based on these reviews is worth considering if you receive enough of the same feedback. By the same token if your customers are consistently raving about one thing and how much it helps them then there are likely more people out there who are looking for that same help. Promote content about that feature so the people searching for it are educated on how you can help. Finding out what your competitor’s customers are raving or complaining about can also provide you with ideas for content and opportunities to steal them away from the competition.
6. LinkedIn Groups – If you are a B2B company then your target market is likely on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Groups provide insight into what people with common interests are discussing. There are groups for just about every industry and they are worth joining to help you stay on top of the questions people in your target markets are asking. Get involved in the discussions or write a quick blog post to answer their question and then refer them to your blog.
Evaluating Your Content Ideas
Once we’ve come up with all the ideas for content we then evaluate them against each other to identify which will help achieve your goals the quickest. Maybe we’ll use them all but we want to identify easy opportunities and tackle them first. We’ll take a look at the search volume for each keyword phrase, the difficulty of achieving rankings or prominent placement of the content, and potential to impact your bottom line. Combining all of this data helps us prioritize what kind of content needs to be developed first. In some cases content answering a few queries might already exist and just need to be tweaked and distributed!
Let’s discuss your goals today
At Neon Ambition our Austin based content marketing consultants can help you understand what a twelve month content marketing calendar would look like for your firm. If you’d like to discuss how we can help your company achieve it’s goals please fill out our contact form or pick up the phone and give us a call on 512-865-8050. We look forward to hearing from you.
