Determining what content your audience wants

Chris and I talk a lot about content marketing and that all the tips and tricks don’t matter if you’re not writing “good quality” content.

WHAT MAKES GOOD CONTENT????

Wow, I didn’t mean to yell but “good” is such a subjective definition. What I consider to be good is not what you might also consider good.

The basic foundation of good content is that has to be educational, engaging, or entertaining. Again, what I find educational might mean nothing to you.

I feel like I’m not getting anywhere with defining “good” content.

Oh, but wait. Yes, I am.

While “good” is subjective, it’s also dependent. It depends on your audience.

There is it. Your audience will determine if your content is “good” or not. So, how do you know what they want?

I asked our slack community how they figure out what their audience wants and here is what they had to say:

“I go into Facebook groups where my audience hangs out and search for words around my topic. And when I have the chance to ask them directly (most groups frown upon using them for marketing research) that’s even better.”

“Go check Facebook groups to see what people are asking about. They’ll tell you what they need.”

“People lie. Behavior speaks volumes. Because of that, I like to make a wide variety of media and then see which one gets the most response. I test that over several campaigns (at relatively low effort because #contentrepurposing).”

“Ask them directly! Survey your audience to find out what topics and formats they like to consume.”

“Forums are a great source of content; find out what questions people are asking and see whether they have been answered. To give you an example; I have a property client and we looked on mums forums to see what common questions were being asked and found out people were confused about what work they can do a property rentals, things like ‘who’s responsibility is it to fix a leaky roof?’. Then by doing some basic googling we could see that there weren’t answer answers. So we wrote a blog post and viola we’re in the no 1 spot for keywords around that.”

“You should execute a buyer persona development exercise that includes research with a mix of both quantitative (like keyword data) and qualitative data with actual customer input (talk to your sales/support folks, customer interviews, surveys). The end result you’re going for would be validated personas that inform your content strategy regarding the needs/wants/desires/challenges your customers face in context of your products/services.
From there, you should have a clear guide on messaging, buyers journey, topic clusters, etc.”

“I start with Search Console and/or Keyword Planner to see what keywords people are using to find the site. Then move into Google Trends to find similar topics that are popular.”

How do you figure out the content your audience wants? Come tell me and the rest of the community in our free slack group, Analytics for Marketers

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