Content writing isn’t as easy as it seems. It takes a lot of effort to get your target audience’s attention. It can get even more challenging if you don’t get the basics right. Every content piece you create is an indicator of your online authority and trustworthiness. Creating low-quality content can seriously hamper your online reputation.
So, how can you create content that shows you are a trustworthy and authoritative source? The answer is through research.
Content research is the most essential part of any content creation journey. It involves analyzing search intent and brainstorming content ideas and topics to achieve your digital marketing goals. Content research reports give you a deeper understanding of a topic and gather key insights. This leads to the creation of valuable, informative, and accurate content that stands out from others. Hence, researching before writing can directly impact the quality of your content, traffic, and level of engagement.
Examine the search purpose
Writing a content piece makes sense only when users want to read it. If there are no readers for a topic, your efforts can go to waste. So, no matter what your content marketing goals are, understanding search intent should be the basis of what you create. When you know what your target audience wants, you can aim your efforts at the right place.
Examining the search purpose can help you find answers to the following:
- What kind of answers do your audience seek?
- What are the issues or challenges they struggle with?
- How can your content solve your audience’s queries and make things easier for them?
These answers can be found through content research. Your content research reports will help you:
- Identify topics that are ranking for your desired search terms
- Learn what your audience wants to read about and discover the topics they are interested in
- Create content that fulfills the needs of your audience at different stages of their journey
- Fill in the gaps in the existing content
Understanding search intent and keyword research also helps decide the format of your content. Once you know about the preferences of your target audience, you can put your content into long-form blog posts, case studies, listicles, product pages, etc.
For example, writing a blog post is useful only when there is informational intent for keywords. Publishing product pages can make more sense when there is a transactional intent. Understanding search intent can thus help you discover:
- Content type – landing page, blog post, or category page
- Content format – tutorial, guide, review, or list post
- Content angle – beginners, advanced, etc
Investigate competitors in depth
After analyzing your target audience and their needs, it’s time to investigate the activities your competitors are conducting in order to rank. Content research gives you an idea about what topics to write about, which keywords to target, and what content formats are acceptable.
The content research report will give an in-depth analysis of your competition. This can help gather valuable insights into your content strategy. It will allow you to leverage the plus points of your competitors and stay one step ahead of them. You also get a clear idea of what Google sees as important for the audience.
Here’s how an in-depth investigation of your competitors’ strategy can help in content research:
- You can benchmark your efforts against your competitors and understand where you stand in an industry
- You can identify and create the type of content your audience expects from you
- You can identify your competitors’ top-performing and low-performing content. This helps you understand what the audience is liking and what content pieces are getting the least attention. You can then redirect your efforts to the right topics and fill in any content gaps
- Competitor analysis also ensures your content remains fresh, up to date, and stands out from the rest
Examine the People Also Asked (PAA) and related searches
Keyword research tools are not the only way to unearth content ideas related to your audience’s needs. Google’s People Also Asked section can also offer valuable insights into what people are looking for.
PAA is a Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) feature. It provides people with additional questions related to their queries and offers crisp answers. The PAA boxes usually include two types of questions:
- Questions clarifying the current search query
- Follow-up questions that may interest the user after he or she finds the answer to the related query
Both types of questions can help you get a better understanding of the browsing journeys of users. These questions can help you discover content ideas and related keywords. You can use the information to come up with content ideas for your blog or include it in the subsections within a long article. You can also see the related searches section at the bottom of the page to know more about user queries.
Consider what additional value you can provide
Your content research should have a clear picture of what your target audience wants and what your competitors are doing to stay relevant. Plagiarizing the exact strategy of your competitors is not something you will want to do.
It is crucial to ensure your content has original data or research, a well-laid-out structure, or an in-depth explanation of a topic. And to ensure this, you need to see things from your readers’ perspective. Think about how you can solve your readers’ problems and add value to their lives.
Here’s how you can make your content stand out and provide additional value to readers:
- Add case studies wherever possible
- Support your content with original research
- Share your personal experience or opinions on the topic
- Add infographics, checklists, and flowcharts to make your content easier to understand
Consult with subject-matter experts (SMEs)
You may not have expertise on particular topics in your industry. In such a scenario, consulting with subject-matter experts can boost your content research. The SMEs can share critical information and provide key insights on a subject that you may not be able to gather yourself.
Now you may be wondering where to find these SMEs. You can find these experts in your organization or industry. Or you can use tools like Ahrefs’ Content Explorer. Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow while using Content Explorer:
- Search for a topic in the search box and select “In title”.
- Now you’ll get a list of all popular articles derived from the historical database. You can filter according to publishing dates, platforms, and more. You can also filter the content based on referring domains, page traffic, and more.
- You can now go through the author’s tab and discover experts related to your niche.
- You can discover popular authors by manually going through the articles.
Note down the contact information and reach out to the experts, but make sure you have a list of questions before reaching out to them. These questions can help you fill in the gaps in your article so that the conversation is useful. Also, convey to the experts the benefits of featuring in your content and how they can add value to it.
Use social media to your advantage
Social media can kick-start your content research. You can follow relevant pages and people and learn about your industry. The posts and conversations can help you collect deeper insights into audience needs. You can know about the latest industry trends, successful techniques, or your audience’s pain points.
Here are some social media channels you can leverage for your content research:
- Consider using Twitter’s advanced search functionality. Here you can enter keywords related to your topic and hashtags. Now filter by dates and minimum engagement level. You can also list popular influencers in your industry and closely track them to know the latest industry trends
- Reddit is another valuable gem for content research. All you need to do is browse subreddits relevant to your industry and review the conversations. You can also start a discussion by posting on a relevant subreddit
- Apart from Reddit and Twitter, you can use other platforms like Quora, Facebook, or LinkedIn
Participate in collaborative marketing
Collaborative marketing is one of the most effective content marketing strategies. You can partner with a brand or an influencer to produce quality pieces of content. Here’s how collaborative marketing can benefit you:
- Collaborative marketing helps you access valuable data from first parties and create more in-depth and interesting content
- You can benefit from the expertise of brands or influencers and unlock critical information
- Your readers get value from multiple perspectives and industry experts
- Collaborating speeds up your content creation process. You have to spend less time on research and writing as experts provide critical information to add to your post.
- Collaborative marketing not only speeds up and simplifies your content research but is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic and build your brand. Everyone involved in the content creation process has a stake in promoting it. When quoted in an article, you get access to many new readers who like reading about your industry topics. Collaborating with brands or influencers can thus help you drive a new audience
Conduct a survey
Accessing third-party information is easy. But when it comes to gathering first-party information, you might get overwhelmed. Rest assured, however, because you can get it by conducting surveys. All you have to do is put out a survey on platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn from your profile or company page. Whatever you choose depends on where you get the most responses to the poll.
You can also conduct surveys in newsletters or communities. Or if your budget allows, you can use paid tools like SurveyMonkey, Pollfish, etc. Paid surveys are beneficial when you want to create data-backed reports, articles, or white-content research papers. To conduct surveys on these tools, you can create a target audience based on parameters like age, gender, location, etc.
Go through reports and white papers
Supporting your content with relevant data is a great idea to make it more rich. Blogs can have limited information. If you want to conduct deeper research about a topic, you need to go beyond reading blogs. One of the ways to do this is by going through content research reports and white papers in your industry. This can help you dig out more data about a topic that you may not find anywhere else.
However, there are certain things you should keep in mind before going through content research reports and white papers. Make sure you read the most recent reports, especially if you want to analyze statistics. Refer to credible sources only; for example, McKinsey & Company, Statista, and Deloitte publish detailed reports and content research papers regularly.
Interact with your readers
Content marketing is not just creating valuable content and leaving it out there for readers. It is essential to engage your audience and monitor them to know about their needs, challenges, and feedback. Interacting with your readers lets you glimpse into their minds and enables you to create useful content for them.
One of the ways to interact with your audience is to share interactive content that encourages them to participate, connect and take action. Here’s how you can do this:
- Post on social media from your business profile asking readers what they want to read about.
- Conduct reader surveys.
- Ask for feedback on already published articles. You can ask readers to rate your article. If the rating for a content piece is not satisfactory, you can try improving it.
- You can use tools like SurveyMonkey, and Hotjar to create and distribute quizzes, surveys, or forms.
Conclusion
Content writing is one of the most powerful ways to build trust with your target audience, establish yourself as an industry leader and increase your traffic. Creating informative, detailed, and engaging content can make you stand out from your competitors. It also ensures your long-term success in the digital landscape.
However, the first crucial step to ensure the success of your content marketing strategy is how much research you have put into it. Content research can help you create valuable content for your readers. The process may intimidate you, but the efforts and time you put in start paying off soon enough.
Now that you know the steps involved in content research, go ahead and incorporate them into your strategy to create some amazing content pieces for your readers.
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